Joiners and leavers: what four years of Sandy Lane Farm's data shows
We've been looking at the customer data behind Sandy Lane Farm, a veg box scheme that has been running on our platform since 2022. Four full years is enough to see the real shape of a business rather than a snapshot. Here is what the numbers show.
Of the customers who place a first order, about a third do not order again after their first month. The number keeps easing down for a while, then settles: roughly 45% are still ordering at six months, 40% at a year, and about a third become regulars who are still ordering two years later. There is a small lift around the twelve-month mark, customers returning as their original season comes back round.
That long, flat tail is the encouraging part. Once a customer is past the first few months, they tend to stay for a long time.
Joiners and leavers
Over the last year, Sandy Lane brought in about 27 new customers a month, and about 21 stopped ordering. The number of active customers grew, but gently, by around six a month. Put another way, four of every five new customers were replacing someone who left, and the fifth grew the business.
That churn rate, about 3.5% of active customers each month, shows up two ways in the data: in the retention curve above, and in the month-by-month change in the number of active customers. Both point to the same figure, which gives us confidence it is real.
One more thing the numbers show
In a typical week, Sandy Lane's orders go to about two thirds of its active customers. The other third are live, paying customers, many of them buying fortnightly, or ad-hoc, who simply did not order that particular week. It is a normal feature of a subscription where people order at their own pace, and it is a sizeable, engaged group that is easy to lose sight of when the week's focus is on the orders that came in.
The opportunity for Sandy Lane
Because the number of customers grows slowly, small changes in retention have an outsized effect over time. The long-term size of a scheme is set by the balance between joiners and leavers. Hold acquisition steady but keep a quarter more of the existing customers, and the active customer base grows by about a third over the long run, from around 770 to around 1,030.
The same starting point leads to three different places. Carry on as now and the customer base steadily grows to around 770. Win a quarter fewer customers each month and it slips back towards 580. Keep a quarter more, and it climbs past 1,000 and keeps going. At this rate of turnover, keeping customers is worth at least as much as winning them.
A couple of caveats This is just one scheme, though a long and clean record. The leaver figure counts everyone who stopped ordering, some of whom return, which is why the seasonal upticks appear. And the projection is a simple model, not a forecast.
Why we do this
Most veg box schemes never get to see the shape of their own business this clearly. The data exists, but the time to dig into it rarely does. Surfacing it is a core part of what we are here for. Our mission is to help local, organic growers thrive, and good decisions start with seeing what is really happening. The better a scheme like Sandy Lane understands its customers, the stronger and more resilient the business becomes.